Word: augean
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...exchange she got New York City's mean streets ("a terrible sight, all that garbage"), its Augean subway ("so loud and dirty"). Davidovich quickly fled to the apartment in Kew Gardens ("quiet, with trees and a fresh smell"). Perhaps the hardest thing to bear was her professional anonymity, the necessity of starting a career over again. "It was very difficult," remembers Davidovich, whose still limited command of English requires her to use an interpreter. "I was very famous in the Soviet Union. I had my public. I did not know if it would be good for me in the United...
...particular Augean stable that 9to5 organizers have taken on, the muck lies deep. Change is slow in coming. The winner of 9to5's "Pettiest Office Procedures Contest" last fall was a man who had his secretary sew up a rip in the seat of his pants while he was in them. ("Men's egos are bigger today," he later explained to The Boston Globe. "Men want that little bit of security that a good secretary provides.") Second prize went to a store manager who asked his clerks to dress up as bumble bees to attract customers into his store...
...funny. Even to Legman they are shocking. "The book is full of material so disgusting that it will make any decent, clean, healthy person want to throw up," he declares. Why then did he spend 41 years collecting and writing the text that accompanies these Augean sweepings of the human psyche? Legman tells us that he began his harvest as a teen-ager in Scranton, Pa., where he was born in 1918. "I got myself in the habit," he recalls, "to top my own father, a notable teller of tales." The psychoanalytically inclined may draw their own conclusions...
Cleaning up the Charles River is like cleaning up the Augean Stables: some folks think it can be done, but so far, mere human agencies haven't quite managed...
...DALE'S national director, arrived in Gary last month, he described the situation as "bordering on civil anarchy." He was not far from wrong. The police department, which has, to say the least, a checkered history, has not done all it might to clean up Gary's Augean stables. At one point, a police detective literally whisked away a prime suspect from the grasp of federal agents and tore through the town with him at 85 m.p.h. Earlier this year, another officer was indicted for perjury; instead of suspending him, the town's civil service commission promoted...